What types of jobs are available for someone interested in macroeconomics vs microeconomics?

Hi Katherine,

That's a great question! I'm an economist and I've spent most of my time working on questions in microeconomics.

These areas work on different questions. Macroeconomists think of the big picture: For instance, how do we achieve economic growth or how can we prevent inflation? Microeconomists think of individual people: Why do they take a job? What skills do they need to succeed (that's what I did research on).

That often leads to different jobs: Macroeconomists often work at banks, or at big institutions like the central bank. Microeconomists are often more used to analyzing data and programming (that's me!), and often that leads to jobs where coding is common (that's me again, I became a data scientist and I code every day).

Does one of those areas feel more interesting to you?

Hi Abby,

This is a great question. The simple answer is that Macroeconomics looks at the overall picture of things in the economy, where Microeconomics look at one aspect of the economy such as prices. As an economist you can get lots of different jobs in many fields. You can go into banking which is what most people think of when they think of economists. Economist do so much more we can really work in any industry. For example some of my classmates are getting jobs at retailers to forecast customers, pricing, and inventory amounts. I have other classmates that are in health economics that work in healthcare field. Some economists work in public policy and some work for private companies as analysts. There are tons of jobs in the field of economics. If you have anymore questions feel free to ask.

Katherine